Genii Ai secures multimillion-dollar funding from Bright Equity Group, Francois Pienaar to accelerate growth

Issued by Genii Ai & Analytics
Cape Town, 07 Dec 2018

Genii Ai, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and machine learning services, has announced that the company closed a multimillion-dollar series B funding round from the Bright Equity Group and Francois Pienaar. The funding will enable Genii Ai to further invest in research and development, talent acquisition and growth.

This Cape Town-based Ai and machine learning start-up has developed and successfully commercialised predictive models that inform customer behaviours to improve customer sales, services and retention. Since inception, Genii has successfully implemented solutions and services at more than 10 of South Africa's top 200 companies. AI and machine learning is nothing new, but Genii believes applying AI to solve business challenges, with a clear ROI, is quite unique in the customer services arena.

The Bright Equity Group and Francois Pienaar have followed the successes of Genii Analytics in the field of applied AI for some time, and have been impressed with its ability to solve real business problems. Kobus van der Westhuizen, CEO and founder of Genii Ai, is a renowned customer service and customer experience strategist and passionate about innovation in digital robotics and RPA. The senior management team at Genii all have extensive experience in this space, and make up a combination of data scientists, business analysts, software engineers and data engineers. With this level of integrated expertise in the customer experience industry, this was a team of experts to keep an eye on, Bright said. Both investors will step in as board members of Genii Ai.

Since then, Genii has established global partnerships with large technology providers in Africa, the UK and the US to distribute these Ai assets. "Everything we R&D is to innovate the improvement of the customer experience (CX), and reduce costs associated with customer service, while improving sales and retaining customers," says Van der Westhuizen

"We have been studying the AI space for a while, with the aim of investing in a company that delivers a real product with clear, demonstrable benefits to its clients. The Genii team has the know-how and industry experience to be a market leader in its chosen niche," said Frank Kilbourn, CEO of Bright Equity.

The investors

The Bright Equity Group was founded by Frank Kilbourn in 2002 and focuses on private equity and venture capital. Bright is invested in technology, telecommunications, beneficiation, manufacturing, tourism and art businesses. Kilbourn has a background in law, merchant banking, international business management and financing. He is also a committed conservationist, philanthropist and art collector.

Francois Pienaar is world-renowned for his depth of leadership expertise and many impressive accomplishments. Best known for leading South Africa to victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, a highly revered and successful businessman, renowned and respected television commentator and a passionate philanthropist are but a few phrases that are synonymous with this South African icon.

Genii Ai

Genii Ai started four years ago to R&D, innovation and analytic platforms to improve customer service, sales and retentions for B2C companies. During this process, Genii developed the first Ai Prediction models to provide future customer behavioural prediction models that could integrate to digital RPA platforms and chatbot platforms. Genii leverage NLP, Text Analytics and machine learning on platforms such as Google, AWS and Azure for the prediction models.

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